Homes

Breathing new life into old stuff

Home-based venture gives discarded home furnishings a fresh start

The kitchen features an eclectic mix of revamped items finished in low-emission paint.

Photograph by: John Mahoney
, Montreal Gazette

A bureau missing its drawers, or a dresser with three legs - most Montrealers are used to seeing discarded furniture sitting on the curb, making a pit stop to the dumpster. But this commonplace sight would come to change Dorothy Kryworuchko's career path entirely. "It's a strange thing. I always felt badly because I would see furniture on the wayside and it just looked lonely."

This fall, Kryworuchko officially launched Deuxième Debut, a home-and-web-based venture where she and her husband, David Languedoc, revamp rescued furniture to resell and "bring back to a useful life."

Their story begins at Grand Prix, 2002. Kryworuchko had left a career in finance in Toronto to move to Montreal to be with Languedoc - and the couple was in the middle of renovating their 4,000-plus square foot building on the corner of St. Jacques and Laporte in St. Henri to open up a bed and breakfast.

Like most other accommodations in the city, they were completely booked for the race weekend. Then they ran out of money. "We were down to the bare walls, no insulation, exposed wiring," Kryworuchko recalls. "And I had to furnish all these rooms."

They toiled as close to round-the-clock as exhaustion would allow to finish. Then, to furnish the rooms on the cheap, they scoured garage sales and street corners for reusable furniture. "We hadn't showered in days, but we were done when the first guest arrived."

Their efforts proved habit forming. "After that I'd see furniture driving along, and I'd throw it in the car and just keep on going," she says.

Soon Languedoc was using their rescued pieces to hone his wood-refinishing skills on their finds, and Kryworuchko was experimenting with contemporary fabrics and funky paint finishes.

Today, the couple's home, atelier and vacation rental (all in the same building) have become something of a shrine to their creations. "We strongly believe in reusing furniture, so our home is mostly filled up with older furniture that we've redone, same thing with the vacation rental," says Kryworuchko.

The atelier where they work is tucked behind the storefront space on the ground floor - stuffed to the ceiling with projects in various states of completion. Among its treasures (most of which are for sale, and each of which has its own story), is an elegant occasional table painted in distressed French country Parisian grey, with pretty silver handles. "Found it on the street, somebody had pitched it, so picked it up, sanded it down, cleaned it, primed it, distressed it and varnished it," explains Kryworuchko.

In another corner is a small night table with mirrors on the facade of its three drawers. "We'll get the drawers functioning properly, and usually I'm the one that does most of that kind of repair work. Dorothy will do the deck and the sides, and the painting of course," says Languedoc.

The couple works as a team - but they're clear on the division of labour. "We'll call her the creative director, I'm the grunt guy," jokes Languedoc. In fact, he's the restorer, while she's the re-purposer.

"David's specialty is taking old furniture and totally redoing it in the old fashioned way," says Kryworuchko, pointing to an antique wood dresser with serpentine design. "These handles were all sanded down and rubbed up and varnished. Then David stripped the wood right down and stained it."

Kryworuchko, on the other hand, reinvents furniture that has no other hope of being saved - by mixing and matching hardware, using different paint techniques, and adding textiles. Her work comes in every imaginable style - French country, shabby chic, vintage and Hollywood Regency. "When I get a new piece, I let it sit," she says. "There have been pieces I've done two or three times because I'd paint it a certain colour and it didn't look happy."

Their specialties are different, but their desire to rejuvenate old furniture is born out of a shared disdain for throwaway culture. Says Languedoc: "I'm probably getting more extreme in my older years, but there's a huge amount of waste out there. People throwing away perfectly good functional stuff. We're fixing them and taking them back to a useful life."

They're also picky about paint - and whenever possible use products low in volatile organic chemicals (VOCs). "When paint dries the solvents evaporate and it's not good for the environment," says Languedoc. "It's not good for you either," laughs Kryworuchko.

Like each of their unique pieces, they've also given their building a second start. "It's an old building, but it looks pretty fabulous," says Kryworuchko. "But when we moved in the place was a dump. We've redone it down to the bare walls."

In the unit they used as a bed and breakfast (which they turned into a vacation rental a couple of years ago to have more time to focus on furniture), they installed beautiful wide-plank pine floors, exposed brick walls, and sanded off a dozen or more layers of thick paint on the handsome wooden staircase. They even unearthed an original skylight in one of the bathrooms.

"There was plastic and all this stuff covering it up, we kind of saw the light coming down so we just started digging in there," says Kryworuchko.

As it happens, furniture is not the only thing the couple is passionate about rescuing. Maggie, their Pomeranian-Chihuahua mix, was adopted following a puppy mill raid. And when they hosted the grand opening of Deuxième Debut, at an aptly-named event called Le Début de Deuxième Debut, at their building earlier this fall, proceeds from sales went to Petits Pawz animal rescue shelter.

For Kryworuchko, the rescue philosophy is the same, whether it's the building, the animals, or the furniture. "Or me," she jokes. "I'm in my 50s, and it takes a little bit of work to get me up to looking better. And sometimes I look at my furniture that way too. It needs sprucing up, a little bit of make-up and some new clothes."

Deuxième Debut creations can be seen online at deux iemedebut.com. The couple also plans to open a retail space in the spring.

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